In January 1998 a cover story appeared in the small, alternative weekly newspaper Washington City Paper: "I Dated Monica Lewinsky" - My Rendezvous with Monica Lewinsky.
There was no need to explain the name;
there were probably only a few people on the planet, or at least in its western hemisphere, who hadn't heard from the 21-year-old White House intern who allegedly had sex with the president and whose picture was ubiquitous.
Bertram Eisenhauer
Responsible for the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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(An understatement: it should be known, down to the smallest details, what exactly happened when, where and how between
the intern
and Bill Clinton, not least because the affair would extend to impeachment proceedings against Clinton and employ a special investigator, in whose final report the word oral sex appeared 85 times.)
City Paper writer Jake Tapper, then in his late twenties (and now one of the most renowned television journalists in the country on CNN), described in detail the date that took place just a few weeks before Lewinsky became notorious.
As luck would have it - but not surprisingly in a city where the majority of the inhabitants pursue or deliver to a single business, politics - the two had met at a party;
at that time she was still one of probably hundreds of completely unknown interns in the capital.
Lewinsky became "this woman"
For the rendezvous, he took her to a "nice restaurant that Texmex served". What he immediately liked about her was that, unlike other of his dates, she ate more than just a salad - her own starters and her own main course! (He declined her offer to pay for her own food - part of the dating ritual.) His dominant impression of Lewinsky: she was happy and open, with "an almost childlike sweetness" - which was "almost childlike innocence" certainly not wrongly translated. His summary: “My mom would have liked it. My dad too. "
Admittedly: The date had no consequences, there was no second, and in the end Tapper's reminiscence was only a tiny part of a tsunami of public attention, triggered by the interaction of two irresistible factors: power and sex. But the story of Monica Lewinsky also shows what happens when social discourse takes hold of a woman's body, and these days this story is literally being retold - in a ten-part television series. Co-producer of “Impeachment” at the pay-TV channel FX: Lewinsky, today 48. The aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes received a respectable 69 percent positive reviews for the first episode that has just been broadcast. More importantly, the series is the continuation of a fundamental reassessment of the affair,which occurs in the larger context of a cultural, mental and social movement of the last few years, which brings powerful men to account who abuse their position. Just two keywords: #metoo, Harvey Weinstein.
But back then, in 1998, Lewinsky himself was “that woman” for numerous feminists, in Clinton's condescending and contemptuous formulation “I did not have sex with this woman”. She was resented by many on the political left for endangering her darling Clinton. The scandal unfolded amid the culture war and polarization that have intensified in the United States to this day. With the Clintons, the generation who had been politically formatted in the 1960s had conquered the White House, and the response from the American right was an unprecedented partisan malice; for her, who had previously tried to scandalize all sorts of alleged and actual misconduct by the Arkansas couple, such a sex affair was a dream. The left opposed it as if out of defiance;many there caught Clinton's argument that the whole thing was a private matter. Many a progressive advised his compatriots to follow the example of the French, who were more nonchalant in questions of sexual life.